Category: Archives and Rare Books

Archives and Rare Books

Precursors to the famous Washington Manual are now accessible online in the Digital Commons@Becker.

By — May 27, 2026

Before it evolved into one of the bestselling medical texts ever published, the Washington Manual began as a series of notes and observations compiled by internal medicine residents rounding at Barnes Hospital in the early 1940s.  These “treatment pro tips” were collected throughout the course of a year of clinical rounding, and then assembled into  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

In Search of Anatomists Past: Phase 3 Elective Goes to Italy

By — May 22, 2026

This past April, the Center for the History of Medicine once again sponsored a trip to Europe for Phase 3 medical students as part of the Dissecting the Past elective. Head of Rare Books Elisabeth Brander, Professors of Anatomy Amy Bauernfeind and Krikor Dikranian, and 11 students with an interest in exploring the history of  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

Slide(s) to the Left, Slide(s) to the Right

By — May 12, 2026

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working my way through the more than 800 slides found in the Institute for Biomedical Computing Records (RG035). The collection includes materials related to the Institute for Biomedical Computing (IBC) and its predecessors, the Biomedical Computer Laboratory (BCL) and the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL). Established in 1964, BCL  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

From Germany to Japan: Georg Bartisch’s Cataract Surgery

By — March 4, 2026

Georg Bartisch’s Augendienst is one of the most famous books in the history of ophthalmology. While it is not the first ophthalmologic text to be printed in the vernacular German, it is perhaps the first text to grant the subject such elaborate treatment: Augendienst is no cheap pamphlet with basic illustrations, but a large folio  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

The Becker Rare Books Tarot Project

By — January 15, 2026

If you stopped by the Annual Display of Rare Anatomical Books last week, you might have seen visitors hard at work on a scavenger hunt around the display. The fruit of their labors? The new tarot decks made with images from our rare book collections! Tarot cards are seen as divination tools and are thus  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

Missile Missives: An Archival Journey

By — December 29, 2025

The year was 1973, and Jerome “Jerry” Cox and his family were en route from Hawaii to St. Louis on American Airlines Flight 152. In the early morning hours of January 12—Cox guessed around 3:00am, St. Louis time—the pilot called their attention to a staged missile launch visible from the plane. Based on their flight  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

A Fine Day : Rediscovering Lives of Perseverance in Archives

By — December 12, 2025

The continued process of digitizing documents and materials in the Bernard Becker Medical Library Archives has made new scans of St. Louis Children’s Hospital publications available in the archives database. These documents shed light on past lives and of turmoil and injustices overcome with perseverance.

Archives and Rare Books

Explore the History of Hearing Aids through a New Digital Exhibit!

By — December 4, 2025

“How Did We Get Hear? Historic Hearing Devices 1800-2000” is a new digital exhibit from the Becker Archives that explores the long history of hearing devices, from mechanical conversation tubes to electronic transistor hearing aids.  The exhibit features nearly 100 different hearing devices from Becker Archives’ Central Institute for the Deaf–Max A. Goldstein Historic Devices  [Read more]

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